The Kid
by DA Cross
Summary: The Doctor finds a boy in a seemingly abandoned spaceship. He wonders what's so special about this boy, but maybe he isn't asking the right question. What's he done to make a whole race fear him enough to lock him up for a hundred years?


**Author's Note: **This story will be written as a kind of 'series' (the events of which will be occurring between 'The Next Doctor' and 'Planet of the Dead') so, if you're not the kind of person that's in for a pretty long 'plot' then I won't be recommending this, but if you are then _hooray!_ Thanks for reading :)

- **Dax**

**Advice: **Change the story width to **1/2 **and **enlarge** the font size twice. It makes reading it just that much easier. Trust me. I'm the author.

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><p>The Doctor drags his fingers along the walls of the spaceship, wondering how long it's been here. He presses his palm to the metal, not even cringing from the cold, and sighs. He can't, for the life of him, figure out what it's for, if it's abandoned, hidden or simply destroyed. The cargo of the ship could have been the size of the TARDIS's interior itself, except it could never feel like the TARDIS; the entire place was frozen, had no source of light and, no, it wasn't alive. Again, he wonders what it was for; cryopreservation, he thinks for a moment. Probably. That was his first guess until he realised the ship was empty. At least that was how it looked like from where he was standing.<p>

Outside, the exterior of the ship was embedded with the Aldar symbol for 'warrior,' and underneath that, the word 'chamber.' He had assumed that the Aldarians had cryopreserved their soldiers, as was tradition, for the next war with their neighbouring planet, Vulpin.

He scratches his head and wonders why they would leave a perfectly tuned spaceship out in the galaxy of Kupenne. The one galaxy that no one - well, mostly no one - dared enter. There were no life forms in Kupenne, no sun, no planets, no anything. Sometimes, beings would be sent there for a torture sentence. Sometimes they came back and spoke of whispers in the darkness, things that scratched them in the night or simply the screaming, the harm they did to themselves in those moments of isolation. Sometimes they never spoke at all.

So then he thinks that this _must_ be a torture ship - neglecting the fact that it was too big for one, and again, the fact that it was an Aldar warrior chamber - so, with his sonic pointed out, he walks across as much space as he can, searching for any sign of life. The whistling of his sonic goes on uninterrupted for a good 15 seconds when it begins to beep. The beeping gets louder as he follows it, to a far corner of the ship, and he starts to hurry towards it, excited by the sign of life, knowing he was here for _something_.

In the middle of all the running and all the excitement, he trips over a chain. No, not just _a_ chain, he trips over several chains only to land on more. He stands up, massaging his jaw, wondering, agan, what those chains were there for. He can't see in this part of the ship, with its being the farthest spot from the doorway, so he feels his way through the chains, stopping when his fingers brush over a head of hair. He follows it down to its arms and pulls it right out of the sea of chains, soon realising that the figure was bound by them. Without a second thought, he takes out his sonic and releases the unconscious boy, draping his small form over his shoulders and carrying him out of the ship.

He sees now that the boy was small. Too small for an adult and too small for a child, yet he _was_ a child, he could see that now, under the glaring lights of the TARDIS.

"I know. I know." He mutters as he walks down a corridor to an empty room. "But this is only for a little while." He lays the boy on a single bed and walks back out.

"I'm not _that_ stupid." He hisses, when the TARDIS begins to shake. It doesn't stop when he runs to the controls to calm it down, yelling, "I'm giving him back! C'mon, eh! C'mon! _Behave!_"

When the shaking stops, he walks out to the doors and sits there, staring at the Aldarian ship. From a rough estimation, he'd say that it's been out for a hundred years, at least. He leans back and slowly lies down.

"That boy's over a hundred years old." He says, then laughs. "Looks much younger - remind you of something?" He thinks he might fall asleep for a while, until he hears a sound, as if something was knocked over, and terrified scream from the child's room. Immediately, he's on his feet, racing past corridors. He almost knocks over the wooden door in his haste, but it opens and, quite suddenly, he's standing in front of the child. His eyes are wide and his face is pale. Once again, he opens his mouth and screams.


End file.
